UK coppers will be naming and shaming motorists charged with drink or drug driving offences throughout December on Twitter.

Anyone ordered to appear in court on suspicion of having committed a drink or drug-driving offence will have their names and details published online and made available to the media. For the first time, the December campaign will be run jointly by Sussex Police and Surrey Police alongside Sussex Safer Roads Partnership, Drive Smart in Surrey and the independent charity Crimestoppers.

As part of the force's year-round strategy to remove drink and drug-drivers from the roads - road policing unit officers will be on dedicated patrols looking for offenders and will tweet any arrests. Although drink driving convictions are pretty much open and shut guilty cases in the UK, it is rare for names to be published before the case hits the magistrate’s court.

Twitter has sued the U.S. Department of Justice as it seeks the right to reveal the extent of US government surveillance.

The lawsuit marks an escalation in the Internet industry's battle over government gag orders on the nature and number of requests for private user information. Filed in the U.S. District Court for Northern California, the complain alleges that current rules prevent Twitter from even stating that it has not received any national security requests for user information.

The messaging service said such restrictions violate the Constitution's First Amendment guarantee of free speech. Writing in its company blog, Twitter said that this was an important issue for anyone who believes in a strong First Amendment, and that it hopes to be able to share its complete transparency report.

Twitter's lawsuit follows an agreement between Internet companies like Google and Microsoft with the government about court orders they receive related to surveillance. Companies are allowed to disclose the number of orders they received, but only in broad ranges. A company that offers email services, for example, would be able to say it received between zero and 999 orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court during a six-month period for email content belonging to someone outside the United States.

Twitter said it will remove images or videos of dead people if their family members request it.

Twitter spokesman Nu Wexler tweeted that Twitter will remove imagery of deceased individuals in certain circumstances. Immediate family members and other authorised individuals may request the removal of images or videos of deceased individuals, from when critical injury occurs to the moments before or after death, the statement said.

The outfit said that it will consider public interest factors such as the newsworthiness of the content while reviewing such media removal requests and may not be able to honour every request.

While some people might get the video that their son tweeted seconds before he drove into a tree removed, if that son is Justin Bieber then it will stay up. Mostly so the staff of Twitter and Fudzilla, can play it over and over again while laughing manically,

There is a XSS (cross-site scripting) vulnerability on Twitter's Tweetdeck which could lead the way for a rapidly spreading worm.

Michael Sutton, VP of security research, Zscaler said that the vulnerability, which was discovered last night could create something like the Mikeyy worm kicked off the trend back in 2009. All the twitter worms out there have relied on cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities, which Twitter has been fairly diligent about weeding out.

“This time the XSS bug wasn't on the twitter.com site, but limited to the web based version of TweetDeck, a popular front end that was acquired by Twitter back in 2011,” he said. While developers have become more aware of XSS and programming environments and browsers have introduced automated protection mechanisms, XSS remains the most common vulnerability seen in web apps, he added. “It remains a common flaw even on popular Internet properties as it can be challenging to properly validate all user supplied input, especially when trying to be flexible and allow users to post rich media content. In this case Twitter user @firoxl accidentally uncovered the flaw when looking for a way to post an emoticon and other quickly piled on, using the flaw to force automated retweets."

Tom Cross, director of security research, Lancope pointed out that XSS vulnerabilities are fairly common web application bugs that have been well understood by security professionals for a very long time. “Any organisation that runs a website should be testing their code for these vulnerabilities before they go into production. In this case, the consequence of the attack is mostly the ability to create annoying pop-ups that spread virally between users, but in other contexts XSS vulnerabilities can have more serious implications, which is why its important to check for them," he said.

The Glorious Republic of Turkey has blocked access to Twitter, following threats made by prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

In a recent speech Erdogan said he would wipe out Twitter and went on to talk about international conspiracies. These conspiracies usually revolve around allegations of corruption, which have surfaced in recent months.

Although Turkey is enjoying a period of strong economic growth unmatched anywhere in the region, many Turks aren't too happy about Erdogan's policies. Erdogan's base is in the rural areas, while city dwellers tend to have a more secular, liberal outlook.

Erdogan has dismissed the corruption allegations and he went on to say that he does not care what the international community says about him.

"Everyone will see the power of the Turkish Republic," he cautioned.

The move came after Twitter refused to adhere to a court ruling, ordering it to take down some questionable links.

It should be noted that political manoeuvring, wrangling and a recent spate of riots have not had much of an impact on Turkey's economy. The country has the world's 17th largest GDP and it is growing at a steady pace. Turkey's GDP went from $196 billion in 2001 to $774 billion in 2011.

While Erdogan's AK party gets a lot of flak for some of its conservative policies, at least it seems to be doing something right.

Social notworking site Twitter appears to keep crashing. Yesterday the site crashed for the second time in nine days when a software glitch stalled the popular messaging service for about one hour.

The company said sorry to its 250 million users in a status blog, saying it had encountered "unexpected complications" during "a planned deploy in one of our core services."

The outage began around 11 a.m. Pacific time and service had "fully recovered" by 11:47 a.m., the San Francisco-based company said. The stock rose as much as 3.7 percent before Twitter confirmed the glitch, but gave up most of the gains to end 0.25 percent higher.

It was a little embarrassing for Twitter co-founder Biz Stone who had just taken to the stage in Austin, Texas, to speak at the South by Southwest Interactive festival, the annual gathering of tech enthusiasts that helped propel Twitter to national fame in 2007.

Twitter crashed briefly on March 2 during the Academy Awards, when the company's infrastructure was overwhelmed by a flood of tweets and retweets from people with absolutely no life about a "selfie" featuring Oscar show host Ellen DeGeneres, Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence and many other celebrities.

Twitter, which always had a few reliability issues, invested heavily in improving its site reliability before it went public in November 2013. Looks like that was dosh well spent.

#CES2014 is just kicking off here in Las Vegas. This year seems to be full of new product announcements as well as updates to existing products from companies big and small. Here at Fudzilla, we will be posting some of the latest news and photos from the show exclusively to our twitter feed in addition to our regular coverage. Be sure to follow us @FudzillaNews to get the latest updates from CES 2014.

Twitter canned changes to its "block" feature after attracting a wave of protest from users who said the new policy empowered perpetrators of online abuse.

Under the short-lived change on Thursday, a blocked Twitter user could view or tweet at the person who blocked him or her, but that activity would have been rendered invisible to the victim as if the offending account did not exist. Under the re-instated policy, users could prevent their harassers from following them or interacting with their tweets. Users are also explicitly notified if they are blocked.

Twitter thought that the change was meant to protect victims of harassment who wanted to filter out abusive messages but feared that the act of blocking a user would prompt retaliation.

Vice president of product Michael Sippey wrote in a blog post that the change was rolled back after complaints. It was not intended to introduce features at the cost of users feeling unsafe.

Twitter shares soared more than nine percent since the company's initial public offering after a spate of product announcements.

Shares rose to $49 in mid-day trading, up 9.2 percent. Twitter has mostly traded in the low-$40 range in recent weeks. One of the things that shareholders are worried about is the companies chance of making serious money so they are sensitive to news that it might have a plan to do that.

Twitter on Thursday officially began allowing marketers to show individually-tailored ads on Twitter, based on websites the user has previously visited. The cookie-based targeted ads, as they are known, are expected to fetch higher ad prices. The company also said it would launch a text-only version of the service that would be available to people with entry-level mobile phones that cannot access the Internet.

Eight of the nation’s largest technology companies sent the lobbying boys around to President Barrack Obama’s place in a bid to get him to call off his surveillance hounds. They face an uphill battle. US officials are confident that the American people are too busy watching reality TV cake icing programmes to care about surveillance. If anyone objects, they can be silenced by stories about how terrorists or paedophiles are going to eat their rather overweight children.

However, the tech companies are uncommonly unified. Google and Microsoft are working with Apple, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo, AOL and Twitter. If you put that lot in a room together, they would normally be calling each other names. In this case, they are working together and pooling their lobbying dosh so they might be able to change someone’s mind.

In a letter to U.S. leaders published in several newspapers, the coalition calls for an end to bulk collection of user information and for the enactment of significant new protections when courts consider specific surveillance requests.

“We understand that governments have a duty to protect their citizens. But this summer’s revelations highlighted the urgent need to reform government surveillance practices worldwide,” the letter says. “The balance in many countries has tipped too far in favor of the state and away from the rights of the individual — rights that are enshrined in our Constitution. This undermines the freedoms we all cherish.”

The proposals include a call for strong judicial oversight and an adversarial process for surveillance requests, including at the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. So far, the US has only seen a backlash against its antics in Europe and in Brazil, but local voters seem rather calm about it. Many of do not actually know where Europe and Brazil are, which probably helps.